Rockwell Museum examines indelible moments of 1969

'Woodstock to the Moon' best for families with youngsters

Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), The Final Impossibility: Man's Tracks on the Moon 1969. Collection of the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. c.Norman Rockwell Family Agency. All rights reserved.

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Arnold Skolnick, Concert poster for the Woodstock festival, August 1969. 'WOODSTOCK' and the Dove & Guitar Logo are registered trademarks of Woodstock Ventures LC and are used under license.

The calendar has flipped to July, which means it's high season for nostalgia in America. Families are piling into vehicles to make distinctly American pilgrimages to places like Cooperstown, the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore. They're also, if the midday crowd on a Tuesday is any indication, paying their respects to the maestro of American nostalgia and mythmaking in visual art at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.

The museum is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and as part of its semicentennial has a show running through October called "Woodstock to the Moon: 1969 Illustrated." Though unquestionably replete with indelible American moments and images, a show about 1969 is treacherous terrain for a place like the Rockwell Museum. How does a place that so embodies the civic-mindedness and optimism of its namesake artist honestly deal with such a fractious and violent year in American history? Another, more practical question is how the museum is going to convey such a sweeping year in American history — especially by focusing on its two most visually arresting events — in a modest gallery space?

On the first question, the curators have punted. Promotional materials for "Woodstock to the Moon" try, unconvincingly, to spin 1969 as "a time of hope and contrast." A less glossed-over reading of 1969 would suggest that whatever hope that may have existed was subordinate to a seething generational resentment and a mistrust of authority. It was the second worst year for American casualties in Vietnam. By centering an exhibit on the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, you are making a choice to examine the politics of the time as well as its music and aesthetics. When Country Joe McDonald got nearly half a million people to boisterously chant a four-letter expletive, that was more an expression of anger, and fear of the draft, than hope.

On the second question, the Rockwell Museum was overambitious. "Woodstock to the Moon" is confined to two cluttered rooms and lacks focus. It feels, at times, like standing in an overstuffed memorabilia shop or a particularly nostalgic uncle's basement. In an idea that probably sounded brilliant in the planning stages, there is a love seat before a 1960s cabinet television playing excerpts from the moon landing, period commercials, Senate testimony from Mr. Rogers and concert footage. People are too self-conscious to sit in the love seat for long, and the whole setup has the unintended consequence of pushing people away rather than drawing them in to the cathode-ray hearthside. Because this element is in the center of the gallery, it becomes more difficult than it should be to take a few steps back and look at the actual work on the wall at a remove.

Woodstock itself gets inexplicably short shrift in the exhibit. There is, of course, an original prototype of Arnold Skolnick's iconic bird-on-guitar Woodstock poster that has, perhaps unintentionally, been hidden in a corner among other concert posters in a room largely given over to "Sesame Street" memorabilia. The only photograph of those three days at Yasgur's farm, a shot by Life magazine photographer John Dominis, does little to convey the biblical immensity of the gathering. It's a shame, because almost every other Dominis photo from Woodstock, widely available online and in books, shows the sweeping crush of people quite admirably. I wasn't there, but my two-disc Woodstock soundtrack is well-worn, and the offerings at the Rockwell Museum just do not get the mood right, man.

Our poor moon does little better. The NASA images of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, among the most captivating images ever made or that ever will be made, do not a get a chance to breathe. Because of the cramped gallery room with too much going on — Nixon, Alfred E. Newman, an elegy for the "Saturday Evening Post," among others — these images of an achievement the human mind can scarcely comprehend turn into wallpaper. They're a calendar tacked to a cubicle wall. Or kitsch.

Cuttingly, the famous shot of Aldrin saluting the flag on the lunar surface stands between the two perfunctory pieces of legitimate protest art in the gallery. To its right, stuck in a dark corner, is Seymour Chwast's Uncle Sam grotesque "End Bad Breath," and to its left is Emory Douglas' "Year of the Panther," which recedes into the dark teal of the gallery wall, shearing it of all emotional heft.

There are some gems worth looking at. Saul Steinberg yet again proves himself one of the most acerbic postwar American illustrators in a more abstract departure from his famous New Yorker work. There is an amazing and unexpected piece by the seminal cartoonist Will Eisner, the man credited with popularizing the idea of the graphic novel. It's an illustrated manual for the M16, the standard-issue rifle for American servicemen in Vietnam. It's Beetle Bailey by way of Khe Sanh.

This show might be something parents would take their kids to see. As colorful and captivating displays of the human capacity for creativity and daring, you can do far worse than Woodstock and the moon landing. Kids get flower power and spacemen. But children thrive on wonder, and even the titular centerpieces here have been sapped of nearly all of their majesty.

Pass through if you want; the permanent collection is still great. But there is nothing here that has not been done better elsewhere. Buy the Woodstock album or watch the Martin Scorsese documentary. Make a day of it and go down to New York and see the Apollo 11 exhibit at the USS Intrepid Museum, a space more equipped to give the moon landing its celestial due. People who went to Woodstock, or claim they did, like nothing more than talking about how they went to Woodstock. Talk to them.